Sebastian Heilmann is Chair Professor for Government and the Political Economy of China at the University of Trier near Luxembourg. From 2013 to 2018, he served as founding director for the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin, one of the leading European think tanks on Chinese affairs. He concurrently belongs to the 15 German representatives to the semi-official German-Chinese Dialogue Forum. Heilmann has many years’ experience providing advice to German and European policy-makers and corporate leaders.

Heilmann co-edited Mao's Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Harvard University Press, 2011, with Elizabeth J. Perry). The book China's Foreign Political and Economic Relations: An Unconventional Global Power (2014, co-authored with Dirk H. Schmidt) brings a European perspective to the international debate on China’s global rise. Heilmann is the editor and principal author of a comprehensive volume on China’s Political System (2017) that includes numerous case studies of Chinese economic, technology and financial market policies. His monography Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy Making Facilitated China’s Rise (published in English and Chinese in 2018) deals with the distinctive interplay of long-term national development agendas and broad-based local policy experimentation that provided an unexpected agility and adaptiveness to China’s economic and technological trajectory.